


The Shape of You

by simplyprologue



Category: Call the Midwife
Genre: Christmas Special, F/M, Married Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Season/Series 05, Smut and Banter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-01-31
Packaged: 2018-09-21 03:15:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9529352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: They lose the taste for socialization, for work, once they’ve finished getting the truck back to the clinic. And with all parties retired to their appropriate quarters, including themselves, they’re quite alone. It’s entirely possible that they should be readying for sleep, that the call to tend to a patient will come earlier than any decent hour. It’s possible they should be washing off the sweat and the mud, changing into clean clothes.It’slate.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** Patrick's "that's my girl" was a little too lecherous for me to leave it alone. So I'll just. Chuck this into the ether and see myself out.

They lose the taste for socialization, for work, once they’ve finished getting the truck back to the clinic. And with all parties retired to their appropriate quarters, including themselves, they’re quite alone. It’s entirely possible that they should be readying for sleep, that the call to tend to a patient will come earlier than any decent hour. It’s possible they should be washing off the sweat and the mud, changing into clean clothes.

It’s _late._

Shelagh wrings out the rag over the bowl with a moue of distaste, leaning closer to examine her face in the dim light to scrub the last of the dirt from her forehead. Feeling a familiar pair of hands settle on her waist, she straightens — it’s been years since she renounced chastity and austerity, but she finds herself touch-starved, still. Her back is flush to his chest as she finishes washing her face.

One hand slides up her side to remove her headband, brush back her hair from her neck. Then, he stoops, pressing his lips to her throat.

Her pulse leaping against his kiss, she tilts her head, baring more of her skin to him.

“You cannot _possibly_ —”

Her stockings are six inches deep in mud, and she might as well write off her shoes, and she doesn’t care to imagine what she must smell like — but she meets Patrick’s eyes in the mirror, dancing with amusement at her mild protest. Anchoring her to him with an arm, he starts walking them backwards.

“Oh, Patrick,” she sighs. He loves the sound of his name in her mouth. “Had I known that you’d respond like this I’d have found a mud puddle to wallow in a long time ago.”

That _might_ be hyperbole. The East End is, after all, full of puddles of questionable content. But they’ve also been the pair who has found the other attractive when up to their elbows in blood and amniotic fluid. And while some years ago this would have been a moment — it took them the better part of an hour to push the truck back to Hope Clinic — where they would have shared a cigarette between them, Patrick must find other ways to occupy his hands and satisfy a nervous oral fixation.

Marriage has been generous in supplying various ways to do that, in moments such as these.

“Would you?” he asks, voice lilting with humor.

“For strategic use,” she clarifies, like it makes much sense at all.

The backs of his knees hit the bed, and freed from the distraction of safely maneuvering them to a horizontal surface, Patrick refocuses his efforts on getting his wife out of her clothes — he draws down the zipper on her dress, sending linen and gabardine to the floor. Shelagh turns in his arms, nimble fingers finding the buttons of his shirt. It’s a practiced routine, and she rids him of his shirt and suspenders as he’s defeated by the hooks on her undergarments.

“I like when you’re on a campaign. The mud is incidental.” Pushing the straps of her brassiere to her arms, he mouths the slope of her collarbones. He lifts his head, considering, lips hovering an inch from pinkened skin. “Mostly incidental.”

“You never seem so fond when you’re the—”

He finally divests her of the remaining scraps of clothing on her top half, then shucks her slip off her hips with a clumsy alacrity. The next part is better accomplished when she’s sitting, so he knocks her off balance with a thigh between her legs and drops to his knees as she bounces on the mattress, stuttering.

“Ah, target of one of my campaigns,” she finishes, spreading her legs for him to kneel between.

“You always get me into form eventually.” One garter, then the other. Were he a more patient man, he’d remove her stockings with his teeth. Instead, he presses his thumbs into the delicate skin of her thighs, and draws them down past her knees, leaving them for her to kick off. “Or knock some sense into me. Either way, in the end, I think you would agree that I am appreciative.”

Her knickers come off in one practiced sweep.

“That is true.” She looks at him, contemplative. At this angle, they’re nearly at eye level. With a sigh, she cards her fingers through his hair and pushes him downwards.

Reciprocity is owed from the other night, and she thinks this was his intention anyway.

“You have many virtues. Docility is not generally one of them. Never surrender, and all that.” His mouth crooks into a lopsided grin, and he hooks a hand under her thigh, drawing her leg over his shoulder. He spots flecks of dried mud on the tops of her thighs and rubs it off, slowly. “And I like to… admire you for it, from time to time. From close quarters.”

Sliding a hand up the plane of her abdomen, he palms one of her breasts.

Flushing from her navel to her hairline, she draws her foot up his back, trying to pull him into the cradle of her thighs. “They could be closer.”

He’ll make her ask for it, because he enjoys it.

“Wilco, Mrs. Turner.”

There’s stubble on his face, and he rubs his cheek against the inside of her thigh, feeling the muscles contract under his hand. He leaves open-mouthed kisses along the path to her center, paying more attention to a cluster of tiny moles near the apex of her legs than strictly necessary.

“Don’t be a tease,” she chides him, tense and desperate to fall apart.

He smiles as she brushes a rakish flop of hair off his forehead.

“Having uncharitable thoughts?”

“If I was, would you enjoy it?” she asks, arching an eyebrow at him. “Well, I won’t call you horrible. Perhaps a scoundrel, you—” He leans in, pressing his mouth against her core, drawing the flat of his tongue from her entrance to the tight bundle of nerves at the top of her folds. Slapping a hand down onto the sheets, curling her fingers into the thin fabric, she fights the urge to wind her legs around his head. “You — you — you are definitely a man.”

He smiles into her.

Toppling her over, he slides his hands under her bottom, pulling her to the edge of the mattress. Shelagh squeaks, an undignified little noise that he enjoys and catalogues. He’s always considered this particular activity in the marital bed to be a point of honor, even if it is just between the two of them. He’s not getting any younger and, well — ladies first. Her hands clenching in his hair direct him, and when she starts to buck her hips into his face he removes one of his hands from under and laces their fingers together over the low flat of her belly, pinning her in place.

A series high, whimpery sounds always precede her peak, and when they begin to escape her lips he presses his middle finger into her to the knuckle, and hooks it, drawing it forward.

Her orgasm is ushered in by a breathless moan, her body stuttering against his grip.

Leaving a kiss on the top of her pubic mound, he pulls away.

“I’m _your_ man,” he finally answers, wiping his mouth with the corner of the sheet.

“Get up here, then,” she says on a sigh. Then, leaning up onto her elbows with an air of challenge, “And if docility is not among my virtues, what is?”

There’s some business removing his trousers and socks first, but he joins her on the bed, the ensuing silent debate on who would be on top yet undecided, tabled with the two of them lying side by side, thoroughly entangled.

“I would venture that tenacity is a virtue,” he says.

His fingers trip over the notches of her spine, hers trace the shape of his jaw. Biting her lip, she considers his, then slants her mouth against his — he tastes of her, she doesn’t mind. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she tries to roll onto her back, but he holds her in place. Breaking the kiss, she blinks at him. Then, in a moment of prevention, removes her glasses and reaches behind her to drop them onto the nightstand.

“You just don’t want to call me stubborn when I’ve got you in hand,” she murmurs, grip on him drifting the south way.

“If you wanted to mean that less figuratively — yes, exactly that, thank you.” Smirking, she kisses the stammer off his lips. He’s half hard already, her touch taking him the rest of the way as his fingers threaten to leave bruises on her hips. “I’d call you stubborn if I wanted to, Shelagh.”

Her answering expression is another silent challenge, though a wholly benevolent one.

“Are you going to—?”

She hooks her leg over his waist.

“I want to see you.”

Flipping them, he holds her in place, and she plants a hand on his chest to steady herself. Skin dotted with sweat, hair a golden mess curling at her shoulders, she cocks her head at him in amusement. A blush creeps across her chest, and he lifts his hands to push her breasts together, circling her budded nipples with his thumbs.

The South African sun has left her with an impressive amount of sunburn, inches of delicate skin left pink and oversensitive. Much of her reddens to match, a heady glow of arousal under the surface. Even this late at night the air is thick with humidity, their bedroom warm, although not unbearably so. The heat between them turns the moment syrupy, slow and wet.

Rocking into him, she hums, and draws her knees in to frame his middle.

“Fair enough,” she says, then counters, “but I want to kiss you.” Leaning down, she does just that, fingers splaying over the side of his neck.

“Stubborn,” he answers, like an endearment.

Shelagh gathers her hair in one hand, letting it fall over one shoulder. Rising up, she takes him and puts him at her entrance, then settles down onto him with a long exhale. “I have it on good authority that you like that in a woman,” she replies, allowing her body a moment to adjust.

“You keep me active,” he grits out, planting his feet on the mattress.

“Oh really?” she asks, and when his hands glide from her breasts to her waist to her hips, encouraging her to move, she starts circling her hips, then rolls them forwards. “Oh…”

He finds her erogenous zones like he was picking them out on an anatomical sketch, playing her capably, urging the burgeoning pleasure at her center with careful touches and suckling kisses, playing his favorite game of driving her to blind, confused ecstasy. Moving faster over him, she plays her own part, testing angles to take him deeper. It’s their favorite kind of race, not against time or any sort of pathogen, and without having to worry about the children in the next rooms they’re obliged to be as loud as they please.

Looming over him, she kisses him in a way that’s more an exchange of breath in a kiss, eyes screwing shut as she wavers on the edge.

He circles her clit with his thumb, thrusting up into her.

Gasping his name, she plants her hands on either side of his head, head bowing until her teeth meet the skin under his ear. He holds her fast to him, chasing her satisfaction with his own. Her thighs, tight as she tries to hold him deep in her, restrict his movements and he feels one mind-numbing moment of blind frustration before reaching his own release, jerking up into her.

After a minute, they part, and she rolls off of him to lie on her own side of the bed.

Turning onto his side, he looks at her with naked devotion, noticing a smudge of mud still on her forearm. He places his hand on her stomach, sliding it up to rest on her sternum to feel her heart thundering in her chest.

The sound of their pulses in their ears begins the quiet, and they can hear the silence of the night surrounding them.

It’s tempting, to forswear any further movement and fall asleep like this, melting into the heat and the satiated after. But it’s the sort of thing one regrets in the morning, waking up with tacky limbs and a mess to clean. Patrick works feeling back into his legs, and gets up to get the cloth, cleaning first her and then himself. Their nightclothes remain where they left them in the morning — a testament to the lock on the door to their room, the lack of children, the looseness in their limbs.

They become the shape of each other again, and fall asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
